JOEY KENNEDY: Bad immigration law leaves an even worse first impression

An English composition course I taught at UAB this semester was amazingly diverse. There were 17 students. Of those, two women were from South Korea; one woman was from France; one woman was from Great Britain; one woman was from China; one man was from Turkey; and another man was Palestinian.

Nearly every class I teach at UAB has international students, but few are as populated with them as this class was. It was a wonderful experience for me, and my international students did very well -- as international students usually do. They have a work ethic that not only is admirable, but also enviable.

Still, several of the students during the semester approached me to ask questions about our harsh immigration law, which went into effect after the semester started. They worried about having to keep all their papers with them everywhere they went because those documents might get lost or stolen. Losing those papers not only would cost an international student's parents a tidy sum, but literally can lead to a student being detained under Alabama's crazy immigration law. Yet, they had no choice but to haul these valuable documents around with them.

We know what kind of attention the state has gotten for arresting international workers visiting our German and Japanese auto plants; wait until an international student from UAB or another state university is caught up in the chaotic, uneven dragnet created by the immigration law.

Welcome to Alabama.

The potential for a real international incident -- one that would make the Mercedes and Honda fiascoes pale in comparison -- is very real.

Sherry L. Mueller, Ph.D., past president of the National Council for International Visitors, which she led for 16 years, is among those who are worried.

"My whole field is called citizen diplomacy," Mueller said last week. She was in Birmingham to speak to a group of citizen diplomats, and she says that even I, as an instructor at UAB who has contact with international students, am a citizen diplomat.

"I'm not a specialist on immigration," Mueller says, "but we need to be reaching out to the rest of the world, not shutting the rest of the world out."

If for no other reason, Mueller says, we should welcome the world for economic reasons. As she points out, 95 percent of our customers live outside the United States. "We need to make a good impression so they'll buy our products," she says. "We need to be a welcoming place, and we need to realize in this time of globalization, we're not the only game in town anymore."

In no place is that more important than education. There are some 723,000 international students studying at America's colleges and universities, Mueller says. That's many billions of dollars in economic impact.

"We need to be making friends with their parents, and making sure they are comfortable sending their kids to UAB," Mueller says.

A law that worries international students is not a good law. That's not all, though.

Orrin Ford, a board member of the International Services Council of Alabama, is one of the citizen diplomats Mueller addressed last week. Ford and his wife, Peggy Bonfield, regularly escort international visitors around the Birmingham area -- anybody from diplomats to journalists to businesspeople to scholars.

Ford fears he'll be driving international guests around one day and get stopped for some reason.

"In my back seat I have people who don't look like us, who are dressed differently and who don't speak English," he says. "The policeman looks in the back seat, asks for documents. If they don't have their passports, the policeman might suspect them of being illegal immigrants.

"We've got somebody who is the guest of the U.S. Department of State, and now we've got an international incident," Ford says.

This is a valid concern under Alabama's immigration law, Ford insists.

"I've done my best to stay away from this issue," Ford says, "but I have no choice. I was appalled with the human consequences of this law. It's awful."

Maybe it's trite, but we really do get but one chance to make a good first impression. Under Alabama's tyrannical immigration law, that good, first impression is becoming harder to make.

Just ask my international students or Ford's foreign visitors.

Joey Kennedy, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is an editorial writer, blogger and editor of the Sunday Viewpoints section for The News. E-mail: jkennedy@bhamnews.com